Actually, one of the ideas articulated and advanced by Alan Kay is that non-technical domain experts should be the people that design and implement most line-of-business apps, and that their IT departments should only do optimizations.
One of the reasons that is may not have worked vis-à-vis the RAD platforms like Access and Excel is that the GUI part always looked polished irrespective of the quality of the program.
But, Scratch programs always looks like toy prototypes, so they never fool the non-technical user into thinking that they built something indistinguishable from what experts do.
Presumably, optimization doesn't necessarily mean making it run faster, but rather is about making is scalable (which means things like cleaning the codebase, addressing security issues, etc.).
Personally, I auto hide the taskbar. Also, having a menu bar per window is advantageous for multiple monitor setups as opposed to MacOS's shared menu bar. Finally, as I am sure you probably know, you can position the taskbar to be oriented vertically.
Rights are a function of responsibility. If an entity has a responsibility over something then it has a right over that something. Although in any corporate body that responsibility (and hence right) will map to a particular individual. I say this as a hardcore libertarian.
Though not intuitive, if you hit ctl-z as soon as it does the autoformat (on anything) it'll revert back and not attempt again for the remainder of the "series".
Use the right tool for the job
on
CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 1
One of the goals of CSS is to separate presentation from content. When I first got into web design, I drank the Web Standards Kool-Aid (coming from a programming background, I can't believe I let myself get suckered into using CSS hacks). I have since come to realize that there are other more efficient ways of achieving that separation without resorting to tableless layouts that require you to spend > 80% of the development time on 10% of the browsers out there. ASP.NET 2.0 master pages go a long way but you can also accomplish the same thing with either simple layout tables , a judicious use of SSI's and/or a good "web language" such as PHP.
I think that God constructed the universe in such a way that the future is unknowable. So the set of all things that are knowable are known to Him but the future is one of those things that can't be known. Hence the universe, such as it is, allows for an omniscient/omnipotent God and human freewill. I'll explain such things as prophecies by saying that God does have knowledge of all possible futures (probably an uncountable set). Also, assuming He is all powerful, He can pretty much say guarantee something is going to happen if he says/wants it to happen.
Now that's the kind of out-of-the-box thinking I like to see. We get more of that and a little bit of Bruce Willis and we might just be able to save this rock.
All kidding aside, that's a remarkable idea.
Surprised no one has mentioned DENIM, it's a free (as in juice) UI design tool that basically combines the advantages of a traditional whiteboard (it uses a drawing tablet for the primary interface) and something like the VB6 IDE. Check it out at http://dub.washington.edu/denim/
Just to further clarify, highschool/college algebra is the study of the operations of addition and multiplication* on the set of real numbers. There are other operations, of course, such as substraction, division and exponentiation but they're really just the inverses or repetition of the other operations. Eventually you'll discover that operations and functions are the same thing (formally).
Can't think of any good websites right off hand, but I'd say start studying (naive) set theory, it'll inform pretty much any mathematics you touch after that. Algebra, for instance, is 'merely' the study of sets and their operations (functions/mappings/transformations among/between sets).
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that so I apologize if this comes off as an attack on your statement. Not being expressible in closed form doesn't really have anything to do with being a 'legitimate' functions (if that's what you meant). Sine and cosine are in the set of transcendental functions meaning that they can never be expressed with a finite number of algebraic operations. But this doesn't make them any less 'real' than algebraic functions such as f(x) = x^2. They are well defined mappings between a set of real number and another set of real numbers. The numbers pi and e cannot be expressed algebraically either (that is, built up using finite operations on some set of natural numbers) but they're just as real (no pun intended) as 6 billion or sqrt(2) though I guess you could also say they're just some series to which we happened to assign a name... but, as another poster pointed out, that goes for any number.
For those of you who keep up with Joel Spolsky, here's what he had to say about a very similar matter
Well, there are a couple of dozen products named Copilot, many with registered trademarks, so our trademark lawyer advised us to use Fog Creek Copilot which would eliminate any possibility of confusion with those other Copilot brand products. The point of trademark laws is that what you're not allowed to do is create any confusion or potential confusion as to the origin of your product, and sticking "Fog Creek" in front guarantees that, but we have to be religious about always using the full name. I didn't really mind, having started my career working on products like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications for Microsoft Excel, etc. etc. After a few weeks on the Microsoft Excel team if you ever saw the word "Excel" without a "Microsoft" in front of it, it looked nekkid.
Well, I certainly sympathize with your sentiments but I'm afraid the only solution is a benevolent dictatorship. After all, who is going to decide not only what's best for mankind but also the optimal allocation of resources to achieve that goal? I think we'll eventually get there; it'll just take a little longer in the absence of some force that is not only benevolent but also enjoys a privileged perspective.
The real issue with the homosexuality debate to me concerns what classes the government should recognize. After all, you must recognize a class before you can discriminate it. So the first question is whether or not the government should recognize sexual orientation as a class. In the (admittedly tortured) parlance of computer languages: is sexual orientation a first class... class? The problem is one of vagueness. Clearly sex (gender) and age (juvenile/adult) are first class categories. Even though they are recognized as such I'm not sure that economic status, physical ability, and race (and I'm a non-white btw) should be. On the absurd end of the spectrum I'm pretty certain that eye color and hair length, sir name, left/right-hand dexterity, etc should not be considered first class categories. Sexual orientation falls in there somewhere that continuum. To further torture the computer science analogy, to me it seems that a good government is like a good OS. The kernel (central government) should contain the bare minimum needed to run. It should recognize only natural categories and leave local governments (state, city, trade unions, etc) to sort out the rest. That's what makes for a stable government. We give the central government purview over those things that are based on sound, immutable principle and let subordinate governments handle the rest. That way if one of the lesser governments gets something very wrong, it doesn't bring down the entire system (hence true federalism is good). So, if it is the case that sexual orientation is not a first class category then we're done with the federal level. On the other hand, if it is the case that sexual orientation is a natural class, then we still have to recognize and wrestle with the fact that heterosexual and homosexual relationships are materially different. Even though we say that they can both "have sex", it is a fact of biology that only one can allow for copulation. Hence one is necessary for the continuance of society (which generally wants to persist in its existence) and the other is superfluous. For someone like me who thinks that government (at least the central one) should do the bare minimum to maintain a civil society, I can find no justification for artificially imposing any kind of parity on sexual orientation or even recognizing it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Butler Lampson summed it up best: Apple knows how make things "yummy".
One of the reasons that is may not have worked vis-à-vis the RAD platforms like Access and Excel is that the GUI part always looked polished irrespective of the quality of the program.
But, Scratch programs always looks like toy prototypes, so they never fool the non-technical user into thinking that they built something indistinguishable from what experts do.
Presumably, optimization doesn't necessarily mean making it run faster, but rather is about making is scalable (which means things like cleaning the codebase, addressing security issues, etc.).
Google Now even started out with the code name "Majel".
Well, at least some people on the MS shell team thought it was better because it would allow them to develop two different shells for regular and advanced users. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/techno... and http://www.reddit.com/user/pwn...
Personally, I auto hide the taskbar. Also, having a menu bar per window is advantageous for multiple monitor setups as opposed to MacOS's shared menu bar. Finally, as I am sure you probably know, you can position the taskbar to be oriented vertically.
Rights are a function of responsibility. If an entity has a responsibility over something then it has a right over that something. Although in any corporate body that responsibility (and hence right) will map to a particular individual. I say this as a hardcore libertarian.
Though not intuitive, if you hit ctl-z as soon as it does the autoformat (on anything) it'll revert back and not attempt again for the remainder of the "series".
You could try doing what these guys did
One of the goals of CSS is to separate presentation from content. When I first got into web design, I drank the Web Standards Kool-Aid (coming from a programming background, I can't believe I let myself get suckered into using CSS hacks). I have since come to realize that there are other more efficient ways of achieving that separation without resorting to tableless layouts that require you to spend > 80% of the development time on 10% of the browsers out there. ASP.NET 2.0 master pages go a long way but you can also accomplish the same thing with either simple layout tables , a judicious use of SSI's and/or a good "web language" such as PHP.
Windows GUIs are ugly and functional. Linux GUIs are ugly and dysfunctional. OS X GUIs are pretty and functional.
There, fixed that for you...
I think that God constructed the universe in such a way that the future is unknowable. So the set of all things that are knowable are known to Him but the future is one of those things that can't be known. Hence the universe, such as it is, allows for an omniscient/omnipotent God and human freewill. I'll explain such things as prophecies by saying that God does have knowledge of all possible futures (probably an uncountable set). Also, assuming He is all powerful, He can pretty much say guarantee something is going to happen if he says/wants it to happen.
Now that's the kind of out-of-the-box thinking I like to see. We get more of that and a little bit of Bruce Willis and we might just be able to save this rock. All kidding aside, that's a remarkable idea.
Surprised no one has mentioned DENIM, it's a free (as in juice) UI design tool that basically combines the advantages of a traditional whiteboard (it uses a drawing tablet for the primary interface) and something like the VB6 IDE. Check it out at http://dub.washington.edu/denim/
Just to further clarify, highschool/college algebra is the study of the operations of addition and multiplication* on the set of real numbers. There are other operations, of course, such as substraction, division and exponentiation but they're really just the inverses or repetition of the other operations. Eventually you'll discover that operations and functions are the same thing (formally).
Can't think of any good websites right off hand, but I'd say start studying (naive) set theory, it'll inform pretty much any mathematics you touch after that. Algebra, for instance, is 'merely' the study of sets and their operations (functions/mappings/transformations among/between sets).
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that so I apologize if this comes off as an attack on your statement. Not being expressible in closed form doesn't really have anything to do with being a 'legitimate' functions (if that's what you meant). Sine and cosine are in the set of transcendental functions meaning that they can never be expressed with a finite number of algebraic operations. But this doesn't make them any less 'real' than algebraic functions such as f(x) = x^2. They are well defined mappings between a set of real number and another set of real numbers. The numbers pi and e cannot be expressed algebraically either (that is, built up using finite operations on some set of natural numbers) but they're just as real (no pun intended) as 6 billion or sqrt(2) though I guess you could also say they're just some series to which we happened to assign a name... but, as another poster pointed out, that goes for any number.
Well, I certainly sympathize with your sentiments but I'm afraid the only solution is a benevolent dictatorship. After all, who is going to decide not only what's best for mankind but also the optimal allocation of resources to achieve that goal? I think we'll eventually get there; it'll just take a little longer in the absence of some force that is not only benevolent but also enjoys a privileged perspective.
Acrobat also uses JavaScript explicitly as an application scripting language as I've just recently discovered. The documentation sucks however.
I believe Monad uses the .Net framework and .Net's regex's classes are a superset of Perl 5's regex functionality.
Although I suppose this is a bit ironic considering the parent author is a foe of a friend I say MOD PARENT UP!!!
I believe FogBugz is exactly what you need.
The real issue with the homosexuality debate to me concerns what classes the government should recognize. After all, you must recognize a class before you can discriminate it. So the first question is whether or not the government should recognize sexual orientation as a class. In the (admittedly tortured) parlance of computer languages: is sexual orientation a first class... class? The problem is one of vagueness. Clearly sex (gender) and age (juvenile/adult) are first class categories. Even though they are recognized as such I'm not sure that economic status, physical ability, and race (and I'm a non-white btw) should be. On the absurd end of the spectrum I'm pretty certain that eye color and hair length, sir name, left/right-hand dexterity, etc should not be considered first class categories. Sexual orientation falls in there somewhere that continuum. To further torture the computer science analogy, to me it seems that a good government is like a good OS. The kernel (central government) should contain the bare minimum needed to run. It should recognize only natural categories and leave local governments (state, city, trade unions, etc) to sort out the rest. That's what makes for a stable government. We give the central government purview over those things that are based on sound, immutable principle and let subordinate governments handle the rest. That way if one of the lesser governments gets something very wrong, it doesn't bring down the entire system (hence true federalism is good). So, if it is the case that sexual orientation is not a first class category then we're done with the federal level. On the other hand, if it is the case that sexual orientation is a natural class, then we still have to recognize and wrestle with the fact that heterosexual and homosexual relationships are materially different. Even though we say that they can both "have sex", it is a fact of biology that only one can allow for copulation. Hence one is necessary for the continuance of society (which generally wants to persist in its existence) and the other is superfluous. For someone like me who thinks that government (at least the central one) should do the bare minimum to maintain a civil society, I can find no justification for artificially imposing any kind of parity on sexual orientation or even recognizing it at all.
But software that exploits bugs (or undocumented APIs) in the underlying platform (OS or hardware) should not be expected to be forwards compatible.